Alessandro Gifford
Neural Dynamics of Visual Cognition
PhD Candidate
Room JK 24/221c
14195 Berlin
I joined the lab in September 2018 as an intern student, and in October 2019 I started my PhD. Before that I did a BA in Philosophy (University of Trento, Italy) and a MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience (CIMeC, Italy).
Things in life that I appreciate are: movies (independent/arthouse), playing Frisbee, mountain hikes and backpacking, electronic music, spending time in nature and parks, learning, cooking and eating, sleeping, sunbathing.
For more information on me and my scientific research, please visit my personal website.
General research interests
My research aims at understanding visual processing in the human brain, following a computational approach. For this, I model M/EEG and fMRI data through machine learning and deep learning algorithms. I am also interested in the intersection between biological and artificial vision, and in how this multidisciplinarity is advancing both fields of research.
I am funded by an Einstein Center for Neurosciences Berlin PhD fellowship. The funding started in October 2020, and will last until October 2023. I am also a member of the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin.
I currently have two ongoing research projects.
Ongoing research projects
- Project 1: What is the idiosyncratic contribution of each mid-level visual area (V2, V3, V4) to the processing of information along the visual ventral stream? How are these areas functionally and algorithmically characterized? We are using the Natural Scenes Dataset to tackle these underexplored questions.
- Project 2: How are the millisecond brain dynamics shaped by naturalistic videos? To investigate this, we are collecting the EEG responses to the Algonauts 2021 challenge stimuli videos.
Student supervision & opportunities
I am supervising the following student: Shreyas Gadge.
I have supervised the following student: Andrei Kitaitsev, Furkan Özkan Hüseyincan.
I am currently not looking for intern students. However, if you have research interests in line with mine and if you have a good computational background (Python, machine/deep learning), feel free to get in touch with me: if I see a good fit and have a project in mind I might consider supervising you.